The sharp snapshots of the baby universe beamed from the heavens by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) recently have thrown new light on the birth of time and raised new questions on matter and gravity. Pegging microwave background radiation, astronomers have by far got the best “baby picture” of the universe containing stunning details that many describe as one of the most important scientific developments of recent years. The new cosmic portrait, which reveals the afterglow of the Big Bang, can now describe the universe with unprecedented accuracy. One of the biggest surprises revealed by WMAP is that the first generation of stars to shine in the universe were ignited 200 million years after the Big Bang, much earlier than many scientists had expected. In addition, the new portrait precisely pegs the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, with a remarkably small — 1 per cent — margin of error. WMAP has, thus, confirmed two major theories: that there was a Big Bang and the inflation theory, which maintains that the universe is being powered by the mother of all fuels and will continue to journey and expand for ever, holds true. Many believe that this cosmic fuel is the all-pervading dark energy, which would ultimately give rise to the cosmological constant, a repulsive cosmic force once invoked and subsequently rejected by Einstein. But the work done by Saul Perlmutter and his co-workers since 1998, only went to confirm it. The latest NASA results provide yet another confirmation for this new paradigm in cosmology. There are other surprises too: the universe is packed with 4 per cent atoms (ordinary matter), 23 per cent of an unknown type of dark matter, and 73 per cent of a mysterious dark energy. All these baby pictures, data, maps and measurements represent major milestones in our understanding of the universe and are true turning points for cosmology. Cosmologists will now start focusing on the polarised afterglow of the Big Bang and hope to witness and snap pictures of the infancy, childhood and adolescence of the universe. Measuring the polarised radiation would take cosmologists to the very abyss of time and the origin of universe. WMAP data and the earlier maps from Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) would also lead to another mystery of cosmology: what caused a sudden hyper acceleration of the universe that ultimately resulted in stars, planets and the human race?
